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Click here to see the summaryThough Beijing reported last week it had hit its stated goal of at least 5 percent GDP growth in 2023, the world’s second-largest economy faces major headwinds in the long term. “The decline [in unemployment] was caused by China’s National Statistics Bureau removing students from the sample, not because of any solid improvement in the youth’s labor market,” he told Newsweek Friday. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt them a blow, especially in the service sector, which tends to hire a higher proportion of young workers, Goldman Sachs researcher Maggie Wei pointed out in a report last May shortly before China stopped publishing related data. With the end of China’s rigid, years-long “zero-COVID” regulations last January, economists predicted the resulting uptick in labor demand might knock 3 percentage points off the youth unemployment rate. The biggest beneficiary of the new reporting methodology is the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Steve Tsang, director of SOAS University of London’s China Institute, told Newsweek Friday. Among these were plans to open up least 1 million internships, support recruiting by state-owned enterprises, and offer one-time subsidies to firms that hire registered unemployed who are in the 16 to 24 age bracket. — Saved 69% of original text.